Silk Road and the Ideology of P2P

This week’s readings made me think about how the ideology behind the Silk Road (whose philosophy is summarised on their Facebook page – “You may buy anything you desire or sell anything you desire. You have total Freedom and Liberty to do as you see fit to do! A true Agorist vision”) matches with some of the ideology behind P2P programs and how there is, as Vaidhyanathan (2004) states, a dichotomy between access values and property values.

In the case of the Silk Road though, it’s not really property values but rather moral values about the illegality of drugs. Users believe that it is their right to be able to access ‘free culture’ through the consumption of illicit drugs. The Silk Road is decentralised (anyone can sell, no one knows who runs it), antiauthoritarian, difficult to manage (the use of Tor, anonymity and Bitcoin management) and extensible in that it can be accessed by anyone that’s ever done a Google search.

Maybe one thing that really connects the two besides through this ideology is the fact that it is an anonymous (mostly anyway) act of resistance from ‘market’ and social norms. Would you steal a car or go to a seedy alleyway to meet a dealer? Or would you rather download something secretly in your jimjams at home or get it expressly delivered to your home without anyone (theoretically) knowing?

References:

Siva Vaidhyanathan (2004) ‘The Ideology of Peer-to-Peer’, The Anarchist in the Library. Basic Books: New York.